


Red Sky in Mourning

by FlygonRider



Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series)
Genre: Death, Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-03 02:43:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5273522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlygonRider/pseuds/FlygonRider
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was pretty, like lightning, like storms, like cigarettes burning red in the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Sky in Mourning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lothlorienx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lothlorienx/gifts).



When she was first born, she was pure. She kicked her legs and pumped her fists and bawled like a healthy child should, and they smiled and said she would be a great warrior.

But, as soon as she took in her first breath, she was corrupted.

The very air of her home burned her, made her angry.

(Maybe that was why her people waged war, because they lived in cities and piles right on top of each other and breathed the same burning air.)

She learned quickly how to use her fists and shards of glass and handfuls of dirt to fight her battles for her. She would start fights, and when she stood triumphant, she could feel a lightness of sorts in her chest.

(There was a fire, no, an ember, beginning to kindle in her belly, and it made her feel better about the crunch of bone beneath her feet, the blood coating her lips.)

Then it wasn’t sky but a deep penetrating darkness that wiped out the tattoos of the stars on the insides of her eyelids. Then, it was suffocating weight, over and over and over again, that nearly broke her spine.

But the little ember didn’t snuff out, and she took pleasure, and maybe just a little bit of pride, in that. She stoked it carefully with little scraps of hate that sometimes littered her brain, and dreamed of standing on a mountain made of her captors, screaming at the lightning to fight her, fight her now.

* * *

The ember nearly goes out, when they rip her open and fill her to the brim with chemicals and tests and things that make her stutter and stop.

But, once again, the ember doesn’t go out (and she would brag about it, if they hadn’t short-circuited her vocal cords), in fact, it takes the chemicals and turns them into gasoline, like alchemists of old, and ignites.

They want to take her, like a package, to a place where they will hallow her out and stuff her back up with brainwashing and propaganda. But they don’t know; they don’t know that she’s come out of the ashes of her past life like a phoenix.

She is a storm, an inferno, squeezed into a vessel that’s too small, too tight.

So she burns.

* * *

She is beautiful in the ways like lightning, like wildfires, beautiful to watch, but keep your distance.

She is destruction, like lightning searing flesh, like wildfires decimating forests to ash, horrible, but absolutely necessary. 

She knew death and she was death, and the little ember had grown into a blaze.

Sometimes they whispered about her behind closed doors or in the little huddles, where they hoped (or maybe thought she was too stupid) to hear, called her the Angel of Death, because she had blood on her hands and in her mouth and sometimes it whispered to her in the middle of fighting, _feed me, feed me, burn ___.

When she found her brother, the blaze screamed, and she became Death, Destruction, and left a trail that nobody would touch. 

* * *

They called her the Angel, because she was beautiful, and because Death could possibly be beautiful, peaceful.

But she leaves a trail of death and destruction wherever she goes, and that isn’t beautiful, no, but sometimes it has to be done.

Of course, all roads lead to Rome and every plague can be traced back to Patient Zero.

So when the bright glittering ships come for her, she goes with them, because she can taste the smoke from her burning home again on her tongue and she finally understands the whole thing about history repeating itself.

Eventually, she breaks free, because you can’t cage Death, and she feels tugging between her shoulder blades like wings.  


And she burns, an inferno from the inside out. 

* * *

She was beautiful, in the way a sleeping death is peaceful, in the way a bomb is sleek and carries colorful mushroom clouds.  


And she burns.


End file.
